UAE | Health
Dubai Health Authority urged to reconsider decision
Residents request municipality clinic be kept open to public to provide medical fitness certificates for visa, work permits
- By Bassma Al Jandaly, Senior Reporter
- Published: 00:00 December 26, 2010
Dubai: Residents yesterday urged the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) to reconsider the decision of Dubai Municipality no longer offering medical tests for expatriates applying for residency and work permits.
They requested that the clinic be kept open to provide medical fitness certificates to the public.
The Dubai Municipality clinic will be part of Dubai Health Authority and will offer services to municipality employees, their families and residents in the neighbourhood, a top official told Gulf News.
The municipality clinic is very popular among expatriates who visit it for medical fitness certificates due to the lower prices and its speed in issuing these certificates.
Officials said that the clinic used to issue nearly 2,000 medical fitness reports a day for residency and visa purposes.
Municipality employees
Engineer Hussain Nasser Lootah, director-general of Dubai Municipality, said the move to stop the service comes in implementation of a decision issued in 2007 to transfer the clinic, which has been part of the Dubai Municipality General Health Department, to the Dubai Health Authority (DHA).
"The clinic will be part of DHA and the municipality will have nothing to do with it any more," he said.
Lootah said that the clinic was supposed to be transferred to the DHA in 2007 but it continued offering its services to the public for the past three years based on a memorandum of understanding signed by the municipality and DHA to allow the municipality to continue to offer that essential service for a period of three years.
According to Zuhoor Al Sabagh, director of Public Health Services Department at the municipality, some 30,000 municipal employees and members of their families as well as residents in the neighbourhood will benefit from the clinic's services.
"Those are the only ones who can benefit from the clinic's services related to the General Directorate for Residency and Foreigners' Affairs in Dubai," she said.
She said the clinic will also continue to provide health services to residents in the same area only but no medical fitness certificate will be issued from the clinic for others.
Residents who spoke to Gulf News yesterday urged the DHA to reconsider the decision and to keep the clinic open to the public to provide medical fitness certificates.
Opinions
They said the clinic, unlike other health centres, issued the medical fitness certificate within 48 hours for normal cases while urgent cases could be completed within 24 hours.
They also said that the electronic services that linked the general directorate and the clinic helped complete the transactions on the spot without the need for a copy of the medical report.
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